Hellmouth #10
"The Board, Pt. 1"
The halls of the two-story, abandoned house near the end of 5th are stricken with chaos. The power went out five minutes ago and its inhabitants, twenty or so vampires, have one-by-one started turning to dust. By the fifth vamp down, the group rationalized that an assassin, possibly many, has been watching them and striking them down. They bounce from wall to wall and hallway to hallway, hoping not to die, but their numbers continue to shrink. The nearly invulnerable species of vampire finds that it knows fear, and the group is downright terror-stricken. The lessened group sprints down the remainder of the main hallway, desperately looking towards the exist as the dust of their former comrades seems to follow with the momentum of their descent. Suddenly the door to the outside bursts wide, light from the moon casting an ominous silhouette of the offender, but the group knew all too well the danger they were in. A crack of fire from a cylinder in his hands spells doom for the two in front, dust cascading on the floor and the smell of gunpowder filling the room. The silhouette laughs a deep and booming cackle at the fearful group, wiping the dust from their clothing and pulling themselves from off their backs. They turn and make their way backwards, fear leading them to forget the conspirators that were chasing them in the first place. The door in their current direction bursts open, and the darkness of the room conceals their killers, despite the innate vampiric ability to see and thrive in the darkness. A distinct sound of air tearing breaks the monotony of the treacherous laughing and wooden bolts tear into and through the flesh of the vampires. Some turn to dust, others pierced in less than lethal areas, but the sound of their screams more than drowned out the booming of the large man behind them. Another flash of fire and gunpowder erupts from the laughing man, showering the backs of his intended victims. The sources of the hailstorm of bolts rip into the room and with wooden stakes and crosses, they finish off whatever fanged beast crawls and wiggles on the ground. Literally, the dust settles and the assassins make themselves known.
"Wasn't there a time when this was, like, ten times harder?" Gene asked, stepping from the entrance of the run-down house, putting the safety back on his patented "wooden-tipped bullet" shotgun.
"Remember what I told you about the gift horse, Gene? We worked long and hard to build a reputation and intimidation is the key to slaying. If they see us as the boogie-men, then they're easier to kill," Lock smiled as he explained.
"Still though, it makes all the newbies you have on your Regulars squad less appreciative of all the man-hours we clocked to earn this boogie- men status," Gene gawked, mentally trying to figure out what is vampire dust and what is property-neglect dust.
"Their necks are attached; I think they're appreciative enough," Lock kicked over a taped together chair. Suddenly a door burst open behind them and a male figure came sprinting through it, huffing and puffing and scared out of his mind. Nicholas raised his reloaded crossbow and aimed at the man's heart. Lock screamed for Nick to halt and he did. "Watch," Lock said. He walked over to the man and placed a cross in his hand. The man held the cross and looked around, still terrified. "He's human. And we don't kill humans."
"Wait, how could you tell at first? I mean, how did you know to stop me?" Nick asked, confused, as were two other "newbies" who had just finished their preliminary training.
"Well, first and foremost, this guy is horrendously out of breath, and fangs don't breathe. Plus, we scoped this place an hour before we cut the power. We held a very accurate count of the vampires in here and we herded them perfectly in towards Gene. There is no way we could have miscounted," Lock sounded very sure of himself. He turned to the exhausted stranger, "How'd you end up in here?"
The stranger motioned over to a door to a closet, it seems, dead- bolted on the outside. Lock gave the go-ahead to Gene, who broke the dead- bolt off with the butt of his shotgun. The door opened up to reveal a walk- in closet packed with what seemed to be teenagers and young adults, obviously drug abusers, each looking like they have been trapped in there for a week or more. Lock closed his eyes and massaged his eyelids, lifting his head and voice when he was finished, exclaiming, "Alright, folks, y'all are safe. The monsters are dead and you all are free to go home. But listen to me closely: if you deal with bad things, bad things will happen to you. If you bring drugs back into this place or any other vacant lot around here again, we may turn the other way if something like this happens. Y'all have been warned. You will not bring down a neighborhood we fight so hard to protect. There will be no 'next time.' This happens again, and you will never see anyone you love again. Now get the hell outta here."
The packed room cleared out, drug addicts who would normally argue with him opt against it given the present circumstances. They crowd out and Nick notices a change in Lock's demeanor. Nicholas hasn't been with the group long, but he has been here long enough to know that Lock has two gears; Lock is jovial and happy around Gene and everyone off-duty, and he has leader-mode, where he is a moral blank slate and he runs off of instinct and training. Sadness, along with most other emotions, don't normally apply to Lock, thus making his new somber demeanor something of a surprise. "Lock..... What's the matter?" Nick whispered.
"Fabini's finally playing this game right. We make it a habit not to get involved in human affairs, like criminals and, in this case, we're talking about a crack house....." Lock said after the last of the crack- heads in question moved out.
"Crack house," Gene pondered, "Couldn't we call it something nicer to make it sound less semantically bad? This is our neighborhood and all. How bout something foreign, like la maison de crack?"
"Cops ain't trained to handle vampires, so they don't, and in that respect, we leave evil of the human kind alone. We don't wanna face two enemies at once, especially when we cant stick wood in their hearts and forget about em. But this one was well thought out: I mean, you have a place that we wouldn't normally check, and you store the people boarding themselves in here because these are people that, more likely than not, nobody will miss. So you have a safe hideout and an all-you-can-drink crack-head supply. Fabini really did his homework on this one," Lock said, more to himself than to Nicholas.
"Why is that so bad? I mean, I'm all for saving humanity and all, but I'm not gonna lose any sleep because some crack-head decides to drown his sorrows in drugs and winds up a meal....." Nick said.
"Regardless, it means that we cant possibly be assured that we've stopped or even slowed down Fabini's army plans. We check the grunt sites every night, but Lord knows where they've been holed up....."
"That aint really a problem. All we gotta do is bend our moral standards a bit and do some undercover work in the seedier parts round here and we're game," Gene said.
"Not that easy, my friend. Fabini's trial is tonight, and whatever he's been building for, it's going down tonight. We're out of time....."
"What are we gonna do? Shouldn't we be there?" Nick asked hurriedly.
"No deal. I contacted Jenn and the Recon team. They're there as I speak, waiting for everything to start up," Lock made eye contact with Gene and Gene looked away. Gene doesn't turn his back to much, but the very mention of the recon team makes him uneasy, knowing that it was one of the very few things that Lock hid from him back in the past. "Let's get on back," Lock said, putting his palm on Gene's shoulder, "because they're gathering the information for us, and we're the ones who're gonna use it." .................................................................................................... ........
Two hours later and about three pots of coffee downed, Lock sits in Larson's chair while Jules, Larson, and Gene bounce ideas off the walls. "No, whatever we do, it has to be undercover. We cant afford a full offensive against the Board. They have troops to match, not to mention that we'll be watching both ends if Fabini makes it out tonight," Lock said, stretching his feet out on Larson's fine wood desk.
"Which brings me to the question, why the hell are we here? We know officially squat right now, and sitting around here aint gonna help the problem," Gene protested.
"Nope, we know quite a lot actually. You see, I had lunch with Jenn last week after we scrapped with the first of Fabini's armies and I had her assemble the Reconnaissance Units and follow what few of the board members we could find. Everyone ready?"
Everyone took that as a hint to grab a seat, but somebody stepped clean through the doorway, stopping Lock's words cold; "I'm not," she said, walking in.
"Ky," Lock said. Jules jumped out of her seat and hugged her around the neck hard, and then she made a comment about how Gene's bitchy wife yelled at her, thus inducing a small smack on the back of the head from Gene. Gene wrapped his arms around her neck and hugged her tight, gently kissing her forehead. Ky smiled and patted him on the butt, a gesture light-hearted enough to get a chuckle out of Larson. Then there was Ky and Lock. Just them. Larson, Gene and Jules were still there, but the tension was enough to blind them out of the picture. "Can we talk?" Lock asked. "Later. You were just about to get all expositionie. I mean, I didn't mean to interrupt..... I just wanted to grab a chair before you started going," she said, her tone showing Lock where he stood.
"Right. Okay, here goes. Jenn and the Recons were only able to find and follow two members of the Board. We found out there are four members of the actual board itself, all four of them are vampires, and they've broken up Cleveland into four sections. Fabini is or was in charge of the Western region. They also have a human member by the name of Jacob Manning. Ring a bell?"
"Yeah. He's a lobbyist, right? Works for an accounting firm and he has heavy contacts with the state..." Gene added his input.
"Yep, and he's also perfect proof that humanity is often the worst demon of em all. He runs the group, kinda like an underground liaison between the state and city government and the demon community. They have one member that's strictly a demon. We don't have a name or anything, but we do know that he's an Aerimaligantic type..... Big, strong and nasty, but luckily he only works as a general demon representative to the Board and rarely interferes in extra-curricular activities, if you will. We shouldn't even see him, much less expect any trouble from him."
"So who exactly are we fighting?" Ky asked.
"Me and Larson talked about this earlier. Technically we have supposedly good relations with the Board to the point where they aren't immediately gunning for us. We wont have any such reservations. Priority one is sticking wood through Fabini's chest and hopefully anyone he managed to raise. We'll be in the mouth of it all when this hit's the fan, so second priority is killing anybody on the Board. As for Manning, I'm ready to see how he likes Cedar in the chest, but Larson here insists that we turn him in to the police or something. He's more than likely going to get off clean with the cops, but the feds might think something different. Don't really care; like I said, first priority is that Fabini is dust. For what it means, I'm thanking y'all in advance because this is a job I should've done myself months back."
"Alright, then Locklear, I suppose it's my turn to ask..... How are we actually doing this?" Larson asked, returning to his tea.
"From what I've mapped out, and this is purely under the assumption that everything goes the way I think it will at Fabini's trial, then this....."
"What makes you so sure things are gonna go that way? Shouldn't we be there, arrows and Hellfire blazing?" Jules interrupted, "Cuz the way I see it is Fabini's gonna be sentenced to death and he's gonna bring down his horde, and that would be the prime time to bring the hammer down on whatever 'survivors' make it out....."
"No, he isn't like that. Fabini's a showman. Those vamps he's raised are his protection from getting killed. I know his type, and I know that he knows just like I do that the Board has a major fundraising gala every year, and that gala is next week. If Fabini's gonna throw down the gauntlet, it won't be tonight unless someone provoked it, like us, because he'd rather make a show of it. We're not there tonight because if we were, it would be all of them versus us, and those odds ain't good. At the Gala, it will be Fabini vs. the Board vs. us, and that makes for better chances."
"Well, just get to it; tell us straight. What are we doing?" Gene asked, now impatient.
"First things first, how do y'all look in formalwear?" Lock smiled. .................................................................................................... ...........
The main Cleveland courthouse was a mastery of structural magnificence in its time. Since then, it has hosted many cases and protected justice to its greatest extent. On certain nights, nights like this one in fact, the history and the majesty of the building becomes far less important than the inhabitants of it. The current hosts happen to be four vampires and a human, one vampire singled out and seemingly lonesome. The others stood in front of him, literally on pedestals feet above the lonesome vampire when the one human spoke: "Fabini of the West, you are here on terms of permanent dismissal from what we call The Board. The allegations brought on your name are severe and centered against your fellow members. Yossarian of the North, if you will....." Yossarian, the tall, slender, and unnaturally pale vampire stepped forward, completely business but his eyes screamed that he has never been happier. "Fabini of the West, your allegations include and are not limited to: fraternization with the rogue entity known as 'The Hunters,' inclusion of said Hunters in internal affairs of the Board, conspiracy to corrupt internal affairs of the Board, conspiracy to risk ill-will on your fellow members, and lastly, lack of public discretion. One of these felonies, much less all of them, results in immediate expulsion and death by fire. What do you plead?"
Fabini gave them the finger.
"As you wish, the Board will accept that as a plea of innocence and will put it to a vote, unless of course you have some kind of defense for your innocence?" Fabini stayed still, rolling his eyes and not saying anything. "As you wish," Yossarian continued, "As the Northern representative of this Board I lay your mercy on the hands of its members: All in favor of Fabini of the West's innocence, say 'ay'....." No sound was made accept from by Fabini himself, who simply laughed at how childish all this sounded to him. "As is my power as the Northern Representative of the Board, you are hereby relinquished of all duties and sentence to....."
"Oh shut the hell up! Jesus! You guys are so tight-assed considering y'all are about to kill me. Plus, I know you guys have been following me and documenting everything I've been doing for the past three weeks, so you all well know about my new following," Fabini exclaimed, seeming very cocky.
"Fine, we'll lose the act," Jacob Manning stepped forward and retook the stand, "You're right, we know exactly what you've been up to and you should be thankful that we at least gave you a fair trial....."
"FAIR? What the hell is this? Where is the jury of my peers? Where is my attorney??"
"This is not a court of American law, Fabini. This is jury and judge by your peers, your ONLY peers, the same ones that you put on the line because of your bitter rivalries. You are way too much of a liability for this group and if you thought you had any chance you would stay the western rep, even if you built some great big army, then your brain is as dead as you are!"
Yossarian stepped forward again, "Did you think some vampire army would make us take you back?"
Slowly, the room started filling with what seemed to be fifty some- odd vampires, forming around their general on trial. "No," Fabini said, "but I have no intentions of being dusted tonight, and if you think otherwise, well then you can bring it on."
"You have no honor, Fabini," Brother said, noting the agreement to leave personal militia out of the inner circle of the Board.
"Yeah? Say that when you walk in my shoes before your friends try to throw you in a bonfire," Fabini mocked, turning his back and walking towards the exit.
"THIS ISNT OVER, FABINI! AFTER WE ELECT A NEW WESTERN REP, YOU WILL BE OUR FIRST TARGET!!!" Jacob screamed, infuriated that he didn't bring his own militia.
"Don't worry. I'll be there," Fabini laughed, walking nonchalantly out the front door.
"So will we," Jenn said, motioning to her Reconnaissance Units to slip out of their harnesses and make their way back through the ceiling patch.
"The Board, Pt. 1"
The halls of the two-story, abandoned house near the end of 5th are stricken with chaos. The power went out five minutes ago and its inhabitants, twenty or so vampires, have one-by-one started turning to dust. By the fifth vamp down, the group rationalized that an assassin, possibly many, has been watching them and striking them down. They bounce from wall to wall and hallway to hallway, hoping not to die, but their numbers continue to shrink. The nearly invulnerable species of vampire finds that it knows fear, and the group is downright terror-stricken. The lessened group sprints down the remainder of the main hallway, desperately looking towards the exist as the dust of their former comrades seems to follow with the momentum of their descent. Suddenly the door to the outside bursts wide, light from the moon casting an ominous silhouette of the offender, but the group knew all too well the danger they were in. A crack of fire from a cylinder in his hands spells doom for the two in front, dust cascading on the floor and the smell of gunpowder filling the room. The silhouette laughs a deep and booming cackle at the fearful group, wiping the dust from their clothing and pulling themselves from off their backs. They turn and make their way backwards, fear leading them to forget the conspirators that were chasing them in the first place. The door in their current direction bursts open, and the darkness of the room conceals their killers, despite the innate vampiric ability to see and thrive in the darkness. A distinct sound of air tearing breaks the monotony of the treacherous laughing and wooden bolts tear into and through the flesh of the vampires. Some turn to dust, others pierced in less than lethal areas, but the sound of their screams more than drowned out the booming of the large man behind them. Another flash of fire and gunpowder erupts from the laughing man, showering the backs of his intended victims. The sources of the hailstorm of bolts rip into the room and with wooden stakes and crosses, they finish off whatever fanged beast crawls and wiggles on the ground. Literally, the dust settles and the assassins make themselves known.
"Wasn't there a time when this was, like, ten times harder?" Gene asked, stepping from the entrance of the run-down house, putting the safety back on his patented "wooden-tipped bullet" shotgun.
"Remember what I told you about the gift horse, Gene? We worked long and hard to build a reputation and intimidation is the key to slaying. If they see us as the boogie-men, then they're easier to kill," Lock smiled as he explained.
"Still though, it makes all the newbies you have on your Regulars squad less appreciative of all the man-hours we clocked to earn this boogie- men status," Gene gawked, mentally trying to figure out what is vampire dust and what is property-neglect dust.
"Their necks are attached; I think they're appreciative enough," Lock kicked over a taped together chair. Suddenly a door burst open behind them and a male figure came sprinting through it, huffing and puffing and scared out of his mind. Nicholas raised his reloaded crossbow and aimed at the man's heart. Lock screamed for Nick to halt and he did. "Watch," Lock said. He walked over to the man and placed a cross in his hand. The man held the cross and looked around, still terrified. "He's human. And we don't kill humans."
"Wait, how could you tell at first? I mean, how did you know to stop me?" Nick asked, confused, as were two other "newbies" who had just finished their preliminary training.
"Well, first and foremost, this guy is horrendously out of breath, and fangs don't breathe. Plus, we scoped this place an hour before we cut the power. We held a very accurate count of the vampires in here and we herded them perfectly in towards Gene. There is no way we could have miscounted," Lock sounded very sure of himself. He turned to the exhausted stranger, "How'd you end up in here?"
The stranger motioned over to a door to a closet, it seems, dead- bolted on the outside. Lock gave the go-ahead to Gene, who broke the dead- bolt off with the butt of his shotgun. The door opened up to reveal a walk- in closet packed with what seemed to be teenagers and young adults, obviously drug abusers, each looking like they have been trapped in there for a week or more. Lock closed his eyes and massaged his eyelids, lifting his head and voice when he was finished, exclaiming, "Alright, folks, y'all are safe. The monsters are dead and you all are free to go home. But listen to me closely: if you deal with bad things, bad things will happen to you. If you bring drugs back into this place or any other vacant lot around here again, we may turn the other way if something like this happens. Y'all have been warned. You will not bring down a neighborhood we fight so hard to protect. There will be no 'next time.' This happens again, and you will never see anyone you love again. Now get the hell outta here."
The packed room cleared out, drug addicts who would normally argue with him opt against it given the present circumstances. They crowd out and Nick notices a change in Lock's demeanor. Nicholas hasn't been with the group long, but he has been here long enough to know that Lock has two gears; Lock is jovial and happy around Gene and everyone off-duty, and he has leader-mode, where he is a moral blank slate and he runs off of instinct and training. Sadness, along with most other emotions, don't normally apply to Lock, thus making his new somber demeanor something of a surprise. "Lock..... What's the matter?" Nick whispered.
"Fabini's finally playing this game right. We make it a habit not to get involved in human affairs, like criminals and, in this case, we're talking about a crack house....." Lock said after the last of the crack- heads in question moved out.
"Crack house," Gene pondered, "Couldn't we call it something nicer to make it sound less semantically bad? This is our neighborhood and all. How bout something foreign, like la maison de crack?"
"Cops ain't trained to handle vampires, so they don't, and in that respect, we leave evil of the human kind alone. We don't wanna face two enemies at once, especially when we cant stick wood in their hearts and forget about em. But this one was well thought out: I mean, you have a place that we wouldn't normally check, and you store the people boarding themselves in here because these are people that, more likely than not, nobody will miss. So you have a safe hideout and an all-you-can-drink crack-head supply. Fabini really did his homework on this one," Lock said, more to himself than to Nicholas.
"Why is that so bad? I mean, I'm all for saving humanity and all, but I'm not gonna lose any sleep because some crack-head decides to drown his sorrows in drugs and winds up a meal....." Nick said.
"Regardless, it means that we cant possibly be assured that we've stopped or even slowed down Fabini's army plans. We check the grunt sites every night, but Lord knows where they've been holed up....."
"That aint really a problem. All we gotta do is bend our moral standards a bit and do some undercover work in the seedier parts round here and we're game," Gene said.
"Not that easy, my friend. Fabini's trial is tonight, and whatever he's been building for, it's going down tonight. We're out of time....."
"What are we gonna do? Shouldn't we be there?" Nick asked hurriedly.
"No deal. I contacted Jenn and the Recon team. They're there as I speak, waiting for everything to start up," Lock made eye contact with Gene and Gene looked away. Gene doesn't turn his back to much, but the very mention of the recon team makes him uneasy, knowing that it was one of the very few things that Lock hid from him back in the past. "Let's get on back," Lock said, putting his palm on Gene's shoulder, "because they're gathering the information for us, and we're the ones who're gonna use it." .................................................................................................... ........
Two hours later and about three pots of coffee downed, Lock sits in Larson's chair while Jules, Larson, and Gene bounce ideas off the walls. "No, whatever we do, it has to be undercover. We cant afford a full offensive against the Board. They have troops to match, not to mention that we'll be watching both ends if Fabini makes it out tonight," Lock said, stretching his feet out on Larson's fine wood desk.
"Which brings me to the question, why the hell are we here? We know officially squat right now, and sitting around here aint gonna help the problem," Gene protested.
"Nope, we know quite a lot actually. You see, I had lunch with Jenn last week after we scrapped with the first of Fabini's armies and I had her assemble the Reconnaissance Units and follow what few of the board members we could find. Everyone ready?"
Everyone took that as a hint to grab a seat, but somebody stepped clean through the doorway, stopping Lock's words cold; "I'm not," she said, walking in.
"Ky," Lock said. Jules jumped out of her seat and hugged her around the neck hard, and then she made a comment about how Gene's bitchy wife yelled at her, thus inducing a small smack on the back of the head from Gene. Gene wrapped his arms around her neck and hugged her tight, gently kissing her forehead. Ky smiled and patted him on the butt, a gesture light-hearted enough to get a chuckle out of Larson. Then there was Ky and Lock. Just them. Larson, Gene and Jules were still there, but the tension was enough to blind them out of the picture. "Can we talk?" Lock asked. "Later. You were just about to get all expositionie. I mean, I didn't mean to interrupt..... I just wanted to grab a chair before you started going," she said, her tone showing Lock where he stood.
"Right. Okay, here goes. Jenn and the Recons were only able to find and follow two members of the Board. We found out there are four members of the actual board itself, all four of them are vampires, and they've broken up Cleveland into four sections. Fabini is or was in charge of the Western region. They also have a human member by the name of Jacob Manning. Ring a bell?"
"Yeah. He's a lobbyist, right? Works for an accounting firm and he has heavy contacts with the state..." Gene added his input.
"Yep, and he's also perfect proof that humanity is often the worst demon of em all. He runs the group, kinda like an underground liaison between the state and city government and the demon community. They have one member that's strictly a demon. We don't have a name or anything, but we do know that he's an Aerimaligantic type..... Big, strong and nasty, but luckily he only works as a general demon representative to the Board and rarely interferes in extra-curricular activities, if you will. We shouldn't even see him, much less expect any trouble from him."
"So who exactly are we fighting?" Ky asked.
"Me and Larson talked about this earlier. Technically we have supposedly good relations with the Board to the point where they aren't immediately gunning for us. We wont have any such reservations. Priority one is sticking wood through Fabini's chest and hopefully anyone he managed to raise. We'll be in the mouth of it all when this hit's the fan, so second priority is killing anybody on the Board. As for Manning, I'm ready to see how he likes Cedar in the chest, but Larson here insists that we turn him in to the police or something. He's more than likely going to get off clean with the cops, but the feds might think something different. Don't really care; like I said, first priority is that Fabini is dust. For what it means, I'm thanking y'all in advance because this is a job I should've done myself months back."
"Alright, then Locklear, I suppose it's my turn to ask..... How are we actually doing this?" Larson asked, returning to his tea.
"From what I've mapped out, and this is purely under the assumption that everything goes the way I think it will at Fabini's trial, then this....."
"What makes you so sure things are gonna go that way? Shouldn't we be there, arrows and Hellfire blazing?" Jules interrupted, "Cuz the way I see it is Fabini's gonna be sentenced to death and he's gonna bring down his horde, and that would be the prime time to bring the hammer down on whatever 'survivors' make it out....."
"No, he isn't like that. Fabini's a showman. Those vamps he's raised are his protection from getting killed. I know his type, and I know that he knows just like I do that the Board has a major fundraising gala every year, and that gala is next week. If Fabini's gonna throw down the gauntlet, it won't be tonight unless someone provoked it, like us, because he'd rather make a show of it. We're not there tonight because if we were, it would be all of them versus us, and those odds ain't good. At the Gala, it will be Fabini vs. the Board vs. us, and that makes for better chances."
"Well, just get to it; tell us straight. What are we doing?" Gene asked, now impatient.
"First things first, how do y'all look in formalwear?" Lock smiled. .................................................................................................... ...........
The main Cleveland courthouse was a mastery of structural magnificence in its time. Since then, it has hosted many cases and protected justice to its greatest extent. On certain nights, nights like this one in fact, the history and the majesty of the building becomes far less important than the inhabitants of it. The current hosts happen to be four vampires and a human, one vampire singled out and seemingly lonesome. The others stood in front of him, literally on pedestals feet above the lonesome vampire when the one human spoke: "Fabini of the West, you are here on terms of permanent dismissal from what we call The Board. The allegations brought on your name are severe and centered against your fellow members. Yossarian of the North, if you will....." Yossarian, the tall, slender, and unnaturally pale vampire stepped forward, completely business but his eyes screamed that he has never been happier. "Fabini of the West, your allegations include and are not limited to: fraternization with the rogue entity known as 'The Hunters,' inclusion of said Hunters in internal affairs of the Board, conspiracy to corrupt internal affairs of the Board, conspiracy to risk ill-will on your fellow members, and lastly, lack of public discretion. One of these felonies, much less all of them, results in immediate expulsion and death by fire. What do you plead?"
Fabini gave them the finger.
"As you wish, the Board will accept that as a plea of innocence and will put it to a vote, unless of course you have some kind of defense for your innocence?" Fabini stayed still, rolling his eyes and not saying anything. "As you wish," Yossarian continued, "As the Northern representative of this Board I lay your mercy on the hands of its members: All in favor of Fabini of the West's innocence, say 'ay'....." No sound was made accept from by Fabini himself, who simply laughed at how childish all this sounded to him. "As is my power as the Northern Representative of the Board, you are hereby relinquished of all duties and sentence to....."
"Oh shut the hell up! Jesus! You guys are so tight-assed considering y'all are about to kill me. Plus, I know you guys have been following me and documenting everything I've been doing for the past three weeks, so you all well know about my new following," Fabini exclaimed, seeming very cocky.
"Fine, we'll lose the act," Jacob Manning stepped forward and retook the stand, "You're right, we know exactly what you've been up to and you should be thankful that we at least gave you a fair trial....."
"FAIR? What the hell is this? Where is the jury of my peers? Where is my attorney??"
"This is not a court of American law, Fabini. This is jury and judge by your peers, your ONLY peers, the same ones that you put on the line because of your bitter rivalries. You are way too much of a liability for this group and if you thought you had any chance you would stay the western rep, even if you built some great big army, then your brain is as dead as you are!"
Yossarian stepped forward again, "Did you think some vampire army would make us take you back?"
Slowly, the room started filling with what seemed to be fifty some- odd vampires, forming around their general on trial. "No," Fabini said, "but I have no intentions of being dusted tonight, and if you think otherwise, well then you can bring it on."
"You have no honor, Fabini," Brother said, noting the agreement to leave personal militia out of the inner circle of the Board.
"Yeah? Say that when you walk in my shoes before your friends try to throw you in a bonfire," Fabini mocked, turning his back and walking towards the exit.
"THIS ISNT OVER, FABINI! AFTER WE ELECT A NEW WESTERN REP, YOU WILL BE OUR FIRST TARGET!!!" Jacob screamed, infuriated that he didn't bring his own militia.
"Don't worry. I'll be there," Fabini laughed, walking nonchalantly out the front door.
"So will we," Jenn said, motioning to her Reconnaissance Units to slip out of their harnesses and make their way back through the ceiling patch.